MIMOSA, a Highly Sensitive and Accurate Power Measurement Technique for Low-Power Systems

Abstract

In the area of wireless sensor networks, mobile computing systems and other battery-driven computing platforms it is an important task to reduce the system’s power consumption, as the usability of such a system is tightly coupled to the duration of a battery cycle. A basic task for reducing energy consumption is the creation of hardware and software energy models to find and understand existing power saving potentials. This often requires a most accurate measurement of both the energy and the timing behavior of such a system. In this chapter we will show that, especially for sub-milliampere applications such as sensor network nodes, commonly used power measurement techniques do not perform well. We introduce MIMOSA, a low-cost measurement device that uses a fast voltage regulator and analog integration circuits to overcome most of the issues existing in other approaches.

“Messgerät zur integrativen Messung ohne Spannungsabfall”, German for “Measurement device for integrative measurements without voltage drop”